Torrens looks at life on the edge

Jackie Torrens' investigates Shag Harbour's fascination with other-worldly visitors, as well as steampunk enthusiasts and cowboy yodellers, in her new documentary Edge of East, airing Monday on the Documentary Channel at 9 p.m. and CBC Maritimes on July 19 at 8 p.m. (PEEP MEDIA)

There’s little doubt that Maritimers are a unique breed of Canadian, and this region forms a special pocket in the country’s larger cultural tapestry.

But what about the smaller nooks and crannies hidden within that pocket, with even more specific interests and obsessions? Jackie Torrens investigates three of these groups in her new documentary Edge of East, and discovers they’re more closely connected than you’d think, partly due to geography, but also by the idea of preserving something valuable.

Edge of East debuts Monday on CBC’s Documentary Channel at 9 p.m. and CBC-TV’s Absolutely Maritimes on Saturday, July 19, at 8 p.m. In the piece, Torrens, a well-known Maritime writer, actor, director and journalist, visits Shag Harbour’s UFO enthusiasts, a gathering of steampunks at Sherbrooke Village, and the cowboy yodellers of Kings County.

A trailer for Edge of East can be viewed at peepmedia.tv under Latest Projects.

The hour-long film is thoughtful, at times lighthearted, but never mocking about subjects its enthusiasts take very seriously. Torrens’ approach adheres to the motto that it takes all kinds to make a world.

“I’ve done a lot of stuff on subcultures,” says Torrens, while on assignment in Fredericton. “I’ve done pieces on citizens’ patrol groups, the world of beauty pageants; I’ve investigated miniaturists, and I really like the idea of taking something that people are passionate about, that they’re almost prejudiced about, and going beyond the stereotypes.

“I think part of that comes from growing up in this region, and having these albatrosses of regional stereotypes around my neck. There’s an idea that life out here is only about certain things, and I’m not knocking these things, but it’s not just the Celtic thing and ceilidhs and fishermen. I grew up in P.E.I., and that wasn’t part of my heritage or my family, but I was still from here, so I had this really strong feeling that that wasn’t me.”

Torrens thinks of her home province as “a land of odd visionary dreamers, who build odd things in the middle of nowhere” like Woodleigh Replicas’ tribute to great British landmarks, or a Cavendish adventure park based around a scale replica of a NASA space shuttle. “I feel like I was born in a place where I can say I’ve come by my love of the odd honestly. It’s part of my heritage.”

With that in mind, why not start at Nova Scotia’s own Roswell, the village of Shag Harbour, where a brightly lit object was seen crashing into the ocean in 1967. It was officially labelled “an unidentified flying object,” and Torrens was fascinated by the way the UFO story has transformed this South Shore community.

“One of the UFOlogists I talked to told me he had talked to a military diver who would not go on the record publicly about seeing alien beings working on the ship underwater,” she says. “I was immediately reminded of a scene in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, where Professor Aronnax is watching Captain Nemo and his crew working on his submarine, the Nautilus.

“And the conceit in 20,000 Leagues is that people think they’re being terrorized by a giant sea monster that turns out to be this submarine. For me there were parallels with what the object was in Shag Harbour, and people trying to figure out what it was.”

While some residents treat the UFO story as a source of fun, baking ET-shaped cookies and dressing up their kids as aliens — or “space brothers and sisters” as one believer would rather put it — for others it’s a mystery or a puzzle they’ve devoted much of their lives to completing.

“Something did happen in Shag Harbour, that is undeniable; there are multiple witnesses who will tell you that,” she says. “And they do it in a very Maritime way, where they’re very pragmatic about it. There’s just enough evidence that something did happen, and the rest you have to take on faith.”

The steampunks also inhabit a space somewhere between science fact and fiction, combining a goal to keep a past vision of the future alive with a sense of craftsmanship and a beautiful esthetic. In a digital age, they’re more fascinated by the intricacy of clockwork and even a dash of mysticism.

“They occupy all three time zones — the past, the present and the future — and they do it in a really interesting way,” explains Torrens.

“I started to fall in love with their flights of fancy. The steampunk group here is called The Jules Verne Society, and he was writing about stuff that didn’t exist yet, like submarines, and you need to have those flights of fancy in order for real things to be created.”

Like the steampunks, the cowboy yodellers of Kings County are dedicated to keeping a unique art form alive. While Torrens knew there were yodelling enthusiasts scattered around the Maritimes, following in the footsteps of Nova Scotia cowboy music legend Wilf Carter, when she put the word out through “the yodelling underground,” she found a concentration of them around the Annapolis Valley, and met them at a gathering in Berwick.

“These are farm people. They grew up around barns and horses, and they love cowboy culture and they yodel to their animals. And they truly are the spiritual kin of Wilf Carter,” says Torrens, who also found some surprising connections between these vocal gymnasts and Edge of East’s other subjects.

“They heard the call of Wilf, much the same way Wilf heard a Swiss yodeller singing a Jimmie Rodgers tune over the radio, and it seems like the priesthood or something — you get the calling to be a yodeller, like it’s something you’re born to be.”